Computer Vision Challenges for Chronic Wounds Assessment

Chronic wound assessment and wound healing are important for diagnostic, follow up and wound treatment. However, this growing disease affecting nearly 2 thousand million and 5.7 million people in the USA and Europe, costing around $20 billion and $8 thousand million USD per year, still relies on subjective human assessment of wounds. A scoping review allowed us to identify 109 articles that map the literature on the topic of computer vision for chronic wound assessment and healing. These results were carefully analyzed and mapped into relevant clinical challenges associated with this field, identifying the maturity of each different computer vision challenge that needs addressing. Results show that wound size and tissue type classification already have interesting work, but various other clinical areas are in need of larger datasets and computer vision research efforts for achieving a relevant impact in today's clinical routine.